Ghosts
by ItachiIsReallyByakuya
Summary: CrossxKanda: The clouds and the smoke twirled together into one.


Here you are, my love, so sweet. C:

Hope it's not btoo/b fail-tackular, as there is no nookie, but I hope you enjoy anyway?

Ghosts

He wasn't sure why the general was there. Hell, he wasn't even sure why he himself was up there on the roof of the castle they both 'lived' in.

The point being that they were there, together and alone, was enough to unnerve Kanda. He never really liked the man, and he was sure that he didn't exactly enjoy his company, either.

It was amazing, he mused, forgetting the red-haired man at his side, smoking contentedly and looking off somewhere distant, that they hadn't killed each other yet.

"Want a bite, kid?"

Kanda looked at him strangely, as he hadn't been eating anything, as far as he was concerned, and Cross gestured with the cigarette. Kanda had smoked before, sure, but he'd never heard something like that in regards to cigarettes. It was…odd.

Then again, what wasn't odd about Cross Marian?

He sat up from his position on his back, where he'd been lying on the slate, and silently took the offered light. He took a puff and handed it back, but not before flicking excess ashes over the tile and into the wind.

It suddenly occurred to him that they were quite high up off the ground. He let out a smoky breath and half-sighed.

"Why are you up here?"

Cross looked at him, almost expecting something, a formal 'sir', or a decidedly more informal title that shouldn't have been mentioned in polite company, but there was nothing more than the question that still hung in the air, unanswered. "No reason, really," he shrugged at Kanda's knowing look, and then explained himself. "I wanted to look at the clouds."

Kanda snorted half-heartedly, "On a day like this?"

The General shrugged with even less fervour than when Kanda snorted, and took a puff. He handed it back to Kanda, who took it warily, but gratefully. This war had taken its toll on them both, so it seemed.

Cross looked exhausted, and older than he should. There were bag's under his eyes, and wrinkles that shouldn't have been there criss-crossed his face, not unlike the tendrils of smoke doing the same around his own. The wind seemed stronger up here, where no one knew they were there, and the clouds even more foreboding in their shades of gray.

A storm was coming, that he knew, and not just in the literal sense. The war raged on, even as more and more finder and exorcists died defending what they thought was right. The Earl and the Noah more cruel and brutal in their ways of torture; but that did not mean that they did not suffer their fair share of loss-six Noah had died already, one of them being Skinn, who Kanda had done in himself, at great expense. More than thousands of AKUMA were being killed each month, through dispatched Exorcists and other means.

The wind rustled through Kanda's hair, making his eyesight temporarily unusable. He pushed it back, and looked at Cross, who looked back.

"You look tired, brat. You should sleep more."

"I can't say too much for you, either, sir." The formality was added upon much consideration. Then, in a much more casual tone, he mumbled, through the newly re-acquired smoke, "You look like hell."

This earned him a half-laugh.

"We should go back inside." Cross was the first one to speak after many more minutes of silence.

"Yeah." Kanda made no move to get up, however, and simply said, "I'll go inside in a few minutes. I need a break from that damn rabbit and that idiot apprentice of yours."

Cross chuckled quietly, and then stood up. "Finish up first, kid, and remember to put it out after."

"Stop treating me like a kid, I'm not much younger than you are." Kanda scowled heartily.

"You might as well be."

Cross had always been a man to do the unexpected of him, Kanda mused as Cross pressed his lips upon his own. A brief meeting, and an even briefer flare of shock; Cross pulled his head back and opened the latch in the roof that would lead him back down.

"See you later, kid." And he ducked down into the hole in the roof.

Kanda never saw him again.


End file.
